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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 99.

In a world where bosses control your life, and thoughts of escape fill your mind, where inspiration seems dead and cynicism rules the masses. You have a desire to break free; you feel the need to take control. Now there exists a place where the secrets of freedom and wealth are given to those who believe. Internet Business Mastery.com – free your mind!

Sterling: Hello, and welcome to Internet Business Mastery online at Internet Business Mastery.com, I’m Sterling….

Jay: And I’m Jay….

Sterling: And we’re here to help you escape the ‘9 to 5’ and live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning your life’s passion into a profitable internet business, even if you’re just getting started today. On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we reveal how to fail at online business in three easy steps. And in the Quick Tip, we share a book about achieving outstanding performance and fulfillment in life and business.

And we’d also like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, you can claim your risk free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to freeaudiogift.com.

So Jay, last time I saw you I was picking you up from the hospital. What’s going on? Give us an update!

Jay: The last time I saw you I was scooping you up off the ground in a pile of mush.

Sterling: I was putting you on my back so that I could walk you out of the wilderness to the hospital.

Jay: It took me eight hours grueling out…

Sterling: To drag your lifeless body through the forest…

Jay: How dramatic can we make this?

Sterling: Yeah exactly.

Jay: Well for anybody following us on Facebook or Twitter knows that we got together recently in Salt Lake to do a bi-annual I guess it is, you know two or three times a year we do a strategy meeting in person. And after three days decided hey let’s end this with something fun! So here’s a bonus Quick Tip for everybody, we went four wheeling.

And just to let you know, when you go to…if you start going off the path…and I wasn’t even doing anything crazy and as I’m sure people are sensing something has happened. Yes, I injured my knee, but here’s the lesson is…if you start going off the path a little bit, your instinct might be…I mean I haven’t four wheeled a lot but I biked. Your instinct from biking is press the brakes and put your feet down.

Well putting your feet down is not a smart idea if you’ve got a machine underneath you that’s like several hundred pounds and it’s just going to keep going because it’s going to jar your leg which is what happened. What happened is it jarred my knee on an old injury and it’s blown up like a big blimp now. So remember if you ever go four wheeling, do not put your legs down on the ground whatever happens, it’s like stay on the machine, brake or bail altogether if it gets bad enough I guess.

And fortunately it didn’t get to that point that I was like going for a tree or anything, but yeah, so I messed up my knee from an earlier injury and I’m going to have to go see an orthopedic surgeon (I guess they call it) later this week and we’ll find out the real verdict on this now.

It’s funny we talked about Strengths Finder recently and one of my strengths is Achiever, I start every day at zero and I have to “earn” points in order to feel good about myself by getting things done. Try telling that to me when the last three days I’ve had to like lie on my back with my leg up in the air to get the swelling down and I start going stir crazy. My little ‘achiever’ is like would you do something already?

And I’m just lying there like having to ask my wife, “Would you get me a drink please?” because I’m not supposed to get up, I’m just stuck there. And she’s happy to help thank goodness but it’s nice to be back up and doing something now, recording an episode although after this I’m going to be lying right back down again because I can feel the pressure and swelling building up again. But hopefully we’ll get this figured out soon enough.

Sterling: Well and I’ll bet you, you have another ten reasons why to have an iPad now.

Jay: Yeah, actually I’ve been using my iPad a ton, absolutely, right, and that’s the whole reason right there, I needed a reason for my iPad and so it took a knee injury to show me the light. There you go.

Sterling: There you go. I knew it. I guess I’ve got to get injured to have any value in the iPad, that’s what I took from it.

Jay: Yep, there you go. Well I guess it’s about time since we’re almost to episode 100, it’s about time we talked about how to fail instead of always talking about how to succeed, so what do you say? Should we do it?

Sterling: Well it’s three easy steps, so there you go.

Jay: Three easy steps, so let’s dive right in.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: So Sterling, let’s talk about how to fail in internet business and like we said, it’s going to be in three easy steps. But I think a good place to start out is to talk about what everybody wants in internet business, particularly what our listeners and our community want.

I think people would agree that failure probably has to do with missing the mark, not getting to where it is that you want to be. So what is it that we want and in face we’ve done a number of surveys of our listeners and one relatively recently and it was interesting to see – asking them what is it that you want most by creating an internet business?

Of course a lot of people said something like quit their job or have more freedom in life, more choices, more options. And of course that translates also into often saying making money because people equate money with freedom.

Sterling: Yeah and I mean I can understand making money as a top reason, but think that actually money, that actually translates into other things that we’re going to talk about like freedom. So like freedom of location, freedom of time, any of the other different freedoms. So I think it’s obviously really good to get clear on the actual like digging deep to what is the main source which that’s kind of what we’re going to talk about.

And as we go through this, really pay attention to what’s coming up in your mind when you’re thinking of starting an internet business. Like deep down, what is it you really want from being your own boss? Like that’s something to be constantly considering while we’re going through this particular episode and as you’re deciding if you’re going to do an internet business, and what internet business to do.

Jay: Yeah absolutely because yeah, we live in a society where money is a necessity and money does represent options and things, and often money is a metric for us to look at as a success and how well we’re doing. But really in the end it represents other things like you just said.

It represents the freedom to do what we want or whether that’s the freedom to buy more things or freedom to help more people or whatever we define that as. But yeah as we see, it really misses the mark if that’s all we’re concentrating on is just oh I want more money. Now there’s two other things that we often hear too.

There’s a whole list obviously but these three things, so freedom being the first and two more are the ones that come up the most. A lot of times people say some form of fulfilling my purpose, contributing to creating a legacy, contributing to my community or to the world, helping other people, that kind of a thing. So purpose shows up a lot as well, purpose and meaning. Second of all, or third of all I guess now, the other thing a lot of people say as well – I want to be able to spend a lot of time with my family or have other kinds of meaningful relationships or be able to work with the kinds of customers I actually like rather than the ones that drain me.

So something about being able to have more time with relationships or have more relationships or have the kinds of relationships that we want, so those are the three things that come up a lot – freedom, purpose, and relationships.

Sterling: Yeah and after doing this online business stuff for years and studying myself for even longer, I think that really all this comes down to is us trying to find our own happiness and that’s like the dig to the bottom or what it all kind of comes to is that. So like more freedom really means more happiness, more time with family can mean more happiness depending on the family of course. And so I think that we both realize that what we really need to talk about is happiness.

Jay: That was a beautiful segway.

Sterling: There you go.

Jay: It’s as if you knew where we were going with this. That’s awesome!

Sterling: Finally a decent segway after 99 episodes!

Jay: Alright, give yourself some credit. So yes absolutely yes, happiness. It really is the thing. I think a lot of people if you said look, what’s the purpose of life or the goal of life I think the answers would often include happiness or some synonym of happiness. And so we’re going to break this down into…and this is all leading to how to fail in internet business but we’re kind of backwards planning here.

So this leads to what we like to call the Three Pillars of Happiness, this is just kind of one model we’ve put together. I mean happiness is something that we each define but taking those three things that came up in the survey and also just stuff that we’ve found in our progress in our business, and success, and lifestyle design, we want to talk a little more about these three things for you in relationships and purpose.

So starting with freedom there’s obviously lots of kinds of freedom. People are saying, “I want more freedom, that’s why I want a business – to make more money so I can have more freedom,” and that translates to all kinds of things. I mean yes, it’s maybe freedom to live wherever you want but it’s also probably freedom from an oppressive job and freedom of bosses that you don’t like or coworkers that just drain your energy.

It also is freedom from yourself, from harmful internal beliefs about yourself that limit you and hold you back or false beliefs about the world that hold you back, freedom from harmful social interactions or within society. So there’s lots of different facets of freedom, and I can remember that day when I quit my job August 15, 2003 and coming home and I think I’ve told the story before of the construction paper numbers were on the wall.

We had like five or six or seven of them, and taking one down every day. I took down the number one because it was the last day and I remember I have a picture of that burning that over the sink – that number one and just feeling an incredible freedom because I knew the next morning I was going to wake up and do what I wanted. And I had some ideas, it wasn’t all quite clear to me, but there was definitely a sense of freedom that I was looking for right away and it was just a wonderful thing.

Sterling: Yeah, you know the fantastic thing about online business is that it can very well lead to this, and in fact for me this was probably my top reason for going into internet business was I wanted freedom of time and location. So this was actually the one thing I was absolutely sure of when I started and all evidence of people that I saw that was actually doing internet business, it looked like they had that option.

So this was the one I knew I wanted to get and again it was mostly the freedom of time and location but it has later became a lot more things. And again after digging down, you were talking about freedom from harmful social interactions or internal beliefs and stuff. And one of the things that I’ve talked about before was, I really really hated not being able to be myself at work.

And I also didn’t like pretending, I was interested in things that I wasn’t. I really hated that and that probably drained me more as somebody’s blabbering on about stuff that I’ve got to smile and nod like okay yeah, let’s do that and take care of that. If this never happened I would be happier probably.

Jay: Right, you start feeling like a trained monkey, I venture to say most trained monkies probably aren’t happy so…it’s interesting freedom, I think that’s for a lot of people it is the reason they dive into this. But you pegged it when you said it can very well lead to happiness but it’s important, also to ask ourselves why do we want that freedom? What are we going to do with that freedom?

I think most people…even though for a bit…well this is great, I sit around, watch TV, and eat potato chips. At some point that’s not going to do it for you, for me it ended up I loved being free and doing whatever I want but it also led me to a state where I was working all the time. Now that became of my identity and because I hadn’t really taken the time to ask myself what am I going to do with this new freedom, and I still had some self-discovery to do.

And I can remember a time where I was just constantly…I’d work twelve or sixteen hours a day and I wasn’t even necessarily productive at it. But it was just this ‘someday, someday I’ll be happy but right now I’ve got to get into it and get some stuff done.’ And that’s ‘someday I’ll be happy’ is insidious and it’s a dangerous thing which is why freedom in and of itself is not enough, it has to be balanced with a couple other things and that’s where the relationships and purpose comes in because at some point you realize I’m not spending enough time with friends and that’s something that fulfills me.

I could definitely give my wife more of my time and we didn’t have kids yet, but I think that’s another thing a lot of people run into whether in employment or in their own business if they’re not careful it just ends up being another job and it takes them away from those relationships that do.

And everyone’s going to have a different definition of what those relationships and connections that are important to them whether it’s kids, or a partner, or a spouse, family, big family, small family, girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, or just some people that you go and have coffee with and talk about the meaning of life. But if you’re not balancing that against or asking yourself well what do I want to do with the freedom, then you can find yourself way out of whack pretty quickly.

Sterling: Yeah, and actually for me online business actually led to me having more and more time with my kids and at the time that wasn’t just the freedom in general was my thing, but this was just an awesome side effect of it because my ex-wife actually works during the day so I’ve been the one to actually take my kids to the doctor or the dentist or anytime they have anything to do with school during the day, I’m the one that goes and takes care of that.

And the awesome thing is, I can always be there. There’s never been any time restriction, or job, or any excuse I can give as to why I can’t go do that. Like even just in the last month my one daughter had a singing event at her school that just happened to be in the middle of the day and a lot of people were mad that they couldn’t move it at night but I was able to be there with a small handful of people and watch her sing, which she gets very excited that we can be there or at least I can be there, somebody is there for her! And definitely internet business has added that new level to relationships that’s just been kind of a cherry on top of everything else.

Jay: The other thing that we want to offset with freedom and this is why we talk about lifestyle design and what kind of business is going to fulfill you, what’s your passion, because we could just teach you okay, here’s the fastest way to make money or something like that but again if we just chase money and freedom, then we’re going to find ourselves in a position where we’re not going towards happiness and that’s the other thing to offset this or balance this with, another critical piece, another pillar that holds this up is purpose.

And over the years my business has come more and more in alignment with my strengths and my fulfillment factors and my unique abilities as I discover the things. Yes I enjoy doing this, nope I don’t enjoy doing that so much it drains my energy. This is the kind of value I want to offer to people, and these are the kinds of people I want to work with and I started out in real estate investing and that was fine. I definitely discovered a lot about myself by taking that action and diving in, a lot of opportunities opened up, I met new people, I had leadership opportunities, teaching opportunities that led me to discover…it’s like you know what I really like doing is teaching, not going out and deal making and real estate.

And so then I end up in podcasting and that was fun because I was helping people with this technology, and there’s a side of me that’s good at technology but really as I discover more what it was that I enjoyed doing as empowering people with a voice and a channel to live their passion through the internet and make money off of it and empower them with this freedom.

And so really at the core that’s what’s making me happy. And the more I know that about myself, the more I can gear my business activities towards doing those things that do fulfill me and that I’m good at, that will allow me to deliver the greatest value to other people as well as to myself. So purpose has been this interesting path and I wasn’t as aware but earlier…and I’m sure there’s still more things I need to learn about myself but it’s been this very key part to the progression towards increased success and increased happiness with my business – is getting more in alignment with I am and what my purpose is.

And the definite major purpose I know is something you helped bring in Sterling into the Internet Business Mastery curriculum because it is such an important part of this whole puzzle.

Sterling: Yeah and honestly the purpose was an exhilarating side effect of internet business for me. I certainly didn’t start to find my purpose, like I said I did it for freedom but it’s definitely helped me develop and really have the time needed to find my definitely major purpose. And I think that actually might be the greatest side effect that has led to more and more happiness for me, is realizing this whole purpose thing and then doing what it takes to make that a huge part of my life which actually makes the rest of it more enjoyable.

Like it makes my relationships more enjoyable and for sure my kids seeing that I am dealing with my purpose and I’m so happy and joyful from that, it makes our relationships better, it makes them see even a brighter future for themselves and just makes my freedom that I do have even more enjoyable. And that was just something that kind of happened as like you said you did real estate in the beginning and I did some eBay stuff before…I was shipping things all the time.

And I actually realized ooh, I don’t enjoy this at all and that’s what actually kind of led to me going hey, I want to do something I enjoy, and that led to the whole definitely major purpose stuff as well as reading “Think and Grow Rich” and just other books that made me really start looking at finding that for myself. It’s funny because this whole internet business thing, I’m always so surprised when I’m looking at other people’s products that teach this stuff and the majority if not most of them don’t ever talk about this mindset stuff.

And I found that that’s actually the thing that makes it work, like anybody can go, “Okay, here’s how you do an auto responder and here’s how you set up WordPress,” but it’s all the other stuff around it that makes it so that it’s a joyful happy thing to do because in the end it’s a business and a business can certainly be fun if you’re a super entrepreneur but that wasn’t exactly how I was. It’s the growth and all the other stuff that made the freedom more enjoyable and being able to understand who I am and all that stuff so that I really love and enjoy doing this.

Jay: Yeah we all think and I remember being there as well, we all think that the people who have been successful in this already, there’s some secret sauce that they’ve tapped into, some secret traffic source, some special way of fulfilling product, something that it’s that missing piece and if only we knew that missing piece or had that secret sauce, then we’d finally bust through to the next level of success and there must just holding that one thing back for themselves. And we’ve often thought and talked about that Sterling, and if anybody were to ask me now, what’s the missing secret sauce, I would say this.

Sterling: Yep, the mindset for sure.

Jay: It’s this right here, what we’re talking about right now. What we’re talking about in this episode and stuff we’re going to talk about in the next episode. This is the secret sauce! And yeah, it all comes back to mindset like you were saying.

Okay, so what about this whole failure stuff  we’re talking about, after all the name of this episode is how to fail at online business in three easy steps. So we talked what we want, we want happiness, which we’ve broken down into freedom, relationships, and purpose; so the other day we were thinking about this failure thing because obviously there’s different things that we’ve seen.

We’ve worked with a lot of people starting internet businesses, and there’s different things that hold people back but often it’s some form of fear of failure, this whole idea of what is failure. What is really risk and is there failure? And we’ve talked about look, there is no failure, there’s only feedback and you learn from your failures. You go to bat over and over again and eventually you’re going to hit the home run, yes sometimes you strike out.

And for the most part I think I do agree with that statement that there is no failure, it’s just feedback but as Sterling and I were talking recently, we realize throughout this idea it’s like you know I think there might actually be three ways to fail in business and really in life and success, and happiness in general – three ways. And this is what it boils down to – first of all, the first kind of failure, the first way that you can fail at internet business or life for that matter is not having reached the level of freedom that you knew you could have and that you deserve.

Sterling: Yeah and I think that this is going to be one of those ongoing battles that will definitely change as you go. Like what I thought was freedom in the beginning as I said and it’s progressed as I’ve gotten different tastes of time freedom. So for example at first I just wanted to have the power over my time. I wanted to work when it suited me and not be a slave to time or to a job and I got that pretty quick, and now it’s about being a slave let’s say to my business meaning I should be able to say leave for a couple weeks if I want, come back and it’s grown.

Like that’s the next level of freedom for me even while I’m gone, the business grows rather than floundering, and that’s just one example so it’s like an ongoing thing as you go as to what level of freedom and that kind of thing. But definitely not having reached a level of freedom or any level of freedom let’s say at the end of life would be something that I would definitely see for myself as a failure.

Jay: And some examples, I totally agree with that, it is an ongoing process…some examples of this would be accepting circumstance or the status quo that society has handed to you or tried to teach you and go, oh well that’s the only way. Or putting up with relationships that aren’t healthy or really need to examined, or re-negotiated, or being a slave to your business – this thing you created for the purpose of freedom and it ends up taking over your life.

And so then the rest of your life suffers, or just accepting it’s like oh, I just have to live where I live because of this job I have when really your life would be much more fulfilled living on the east coast or in a tropical island or whatever it is for you. Or maybe it’s going out in Suburbia and having the nice house or whatever, so those are some of the examples. Like we said there’s lots of different types of freedom which is why this is an ongoing process.

But if you’re not striving for more and you get to the end of your life and it’s like you know what, I didn’t even try for a level of freedom that I really knew that I could have had or deserved, then I think that’s an unfortunate thing because that’s a hindrance to happiness and hence maybe one type of failure that there could be.

Number two thing then is not to have acquired and enjoyed the kind of relationships that you want. And again this is going to be a different definition for everyone like we said, some people want to be surrounded by their family at the end of their lives, some people would have been happy to just have created a legacy that impacted a lot of people around the world. Some people would have been happy with kids, some people don’t need kids, some with a life partner, some without.

But whatever that is and I think you know inside yourself what kind of connectedness you want and need in your life, and to not allowed yourself or negotiated those things or acquired them and enjoyed them in your life and to reach in your life and realize that I think would be another kind of failure.

Sterling: Definitely.

Jay: And the third way to fail in business or really in success in life is not to have fulfilled your purpose. And there’s a story at the beginning of Strengths Finder and it goes something like this and I found it very poignant, and as a note it’s about a guy who goes into the afterlife and whatever your approach to whether you believe in an afterlife or not this is a very illustrative story and that is that this guy arrives at the gates of Heaven, nirvana, or whatever you call it and he’s about to go in and he’s a curious guy.

So the guy who’s there to greet him says, “You know I’ve always wondered, because I’m an artistic guy, I’ve always wondered, well who was the greatest poet that ever was? I liked reading and philosophizing and poetry and appreciate art, and I’ve always been in search of the greatest poet ever. Who is that?” And then the guy’s like “Actually he’s standing right over here,” and he points at a guy and he looks over at the guy who’s the greeter or welcomer he’d pointed to and he recognizes it as this average peasant down the street who had just lived a very simple and plain life.

And he goes, “Oh that guy wasn’t a poet, what are you talking about?” And he’s like, “Well yeah, had he chosen to be a poet, had he actually fulfilled that purpose that he had inside of himself he would have been the greatest poet that ever was.” And we all define our own purpose and our own happiness but I think it would be a failure to reach the end of your life knowing that you had within you a desire to do something, a strength, a talent, a unique ability, a value that you could have offered both to yourself – to your happiness – as well as maybe even those around you and to not have achieved that thing. And so that’s why it just really hit me when I read that story, I was like yeah, I do not want to be that person at the end of my life going, “Man, what could have I been if only?”

Sterling: Yeah so my first business didn’t even come close to fulfilling my purpose as I worked twelve hours a day making and shipping products that weren’t even mine. Now of course I didn’t know that in the beginning that that wouldn’t be fulfilling because I didn’t know what my purpose was but I realized that I really hated doing that.

And I did know very quickly that I needed to be able to help people through my own voice and also not to have to ship products. So that’s something rather than just going wow, I really hate this and this must be what internet business is and stopping doing that which would have been failure for sure, I just went okay, well how do I do this so I like it? Well I knew I wanted to do my voice, what I have to say about it and really help people and again, not have to ship actual physical products.

Jay: Absolutely, so let’s go ahead and sum up what we’re saying here. The three ways to fail in business, and number one would be (and you’re going to see a common theme here in each one), but number one would be don’t take action towards increased freedom in your life, that you want and you deserve.

Sterling: Yeah so picture yourself having stayed in this unfulfilling place you might be in now and for me, I really hated to pretend to care about stuff that I didn’t have any interest in and that was another big motivator for me. As I said, I really thought about what it would be for another 20-30 years of nodding my head pretending I cared about stuff. I mean that was really painful for me and that was only one thing, but that’s just the example I’m giving is – every single day having to pretend I cared about stuff I didn’t and again, 20 or 30 more years of that. I was just like; I can’t do this.

Jay: I can’t imagine that knowing you now and I guess I probably had met you a couple or so years after you were at that point but I’m sitting here trying to picture you…like I can’t even imagine you in that position. Like that is so not Sterling, it’s just not.

Sterling: Well and can you imagine too, it was okay, we need to put Paris Hilton more in this video and I’m like “Yes, you are correct. I love her, this is great, what a great job…” [in monotone voice].

Jay: So the number two way to fail would be don’t take action towards acquiring and enjoying the relationships that you really want in life.

Sterling: Yeah and I guess for me it was being with my kids, I couldn’t get that time back. So like it would be like saying, “Sorry, Daddy has to work.” I would really felt a hole later in life if I had to say that stuff for all of their young life, that was just another driving pain that really helped me continue with this business even when it was hard or a little bit boring. Like I definitely didn’t like creating websites per se, and of course we have ways to not have to do that anyway in the Academy, so don’t have to go through the boring part.

And there were just parts that weren’t fun, like it’s a business, you’ve got to do it. And that can happen sometimes, but for me like being able to look at that and have to say that to my kids their whole childhood, that was a pain that helped me actually take action for it.

Jay: And the third way to fail would be, don’t take action towards pursuing…discovering I should say, discovering and pursuing your purpose, the things that fulfill you, the unique abilities you have, the strengths you have to express, the things that you have to offer not only for yourself, but also for others.

Sterling: Yeah and again for me, now that I know about purpose, this definitely would have killed me even a year earlier. If we’d looked at this before we died, I would have died quicker not being who I truly am and at least going on that journey as I know you would as well.

Jay: Absolutely, and especially as I discover more and more about the things that I feel that I have to offer that are my strengths, that I enjoy doing, I’m just more and more thankful for having worked hard to be in a position where I can really express those more fully every day. It’s just such an awesome thing to experience.

And so just to tie this back to internet business because I know we said how to fail in internet business, I mean yes we’re here, Internet Business Mastery, we’re here teaching internet business. But ultimately, we’re trying to show this path, this way that has brought us a lot of happiness, brings us increased happiness every day, a place where we pursue more happiness every day and bring that and offer that to others to benefit from as well.

Starting with freedom – how to build a business that fits your lifestyle that you want, to live wherever you want, to make as much money as you want, to choose the customers you want to work with, to make it through recessions that enslave people. I mean we heard this crazy statistic recently, I mean think about a couple years ago when everything was just started hitting and people started losing houses and banks are having trouble.

Everyone stuck to employment for security but those are some of the people (employees) that were suffering the most. We heard a crazy statistic, that most people who lost their houses were maybe $300 a month away from actually being able to keep their house. And to me that’s just crazy because now as an entrepreneur feeling empowered with these skills, if all of a sudden today I needed $300 more a month, I feel like I could create that within this week.

Like it would be there and so it’s like what in the end is actually freedom? Leasing all my time away to somebody so I have no options to do anything else with my time, or going out and learning the skills, and putting myself in a place so that I can instantly create that bit of money that might be the difference between losing my house or not. It’s about the power to create options is what it is.

Sterling: Yeah and honestly the way we would do that just so it clicks in your mind is, we could instantly go – what’s something we could offer our people that would give them incredible value for “x” amount of price? It could be anything from a specific course to even a coaching call, I mean all of that is available to you when you have a list of people who want your assistance on something.

Jay: So the next thing would be then to tie it to relationships, I mean we’ve already mentioned internet business because of freedom of time, you can spend more time with family if you want, you can spend more time with friends if you want, you can spend more time out connecting in whatever way you find meaningful to you and you have more money to help those who are around you.

If there’s causes and people, family members, friends, whoever that you’ve got the means and resources to help those people and spread the benefit around. And then finally there’s the purpose and that’s why very clearly in our tagline we say, “turn your life’s passion into a profitable internet business.” Find out who that is that you are, what it is that you want to bring and let’s make that profitable for you. So not only can you express yourself fully for happiness but you can make plenty of money doing it too and it’s such a brilliant channel for doing that.

And so that’s how those three things, those three failures tie right back into internet business as a way to actually avoid having those three regrets or those three failures at the end of your life. And this is why in the Academy we not only teach the step-by-step mechanics of online business but it’s also full of what it needed, have you outline what is needed for happiness in your life. What is the purpose you want to pursue, what are the fulfillment factors you have, what’s your definite major purpose so that your business becomes a means for success and happiness and really becoming fully who you want to be at the end of your life.

So business and success mean very little if you don’t achieve happiness I think at the end, at first it was about freedom and we started realizing look, if I’m not happy at the end of my life then what purpose what that for? And that’s why we talked about the secret sauce earlier, this is for us what we have found to be the secret sauce. If we ever feel like we’re floundering ourselves or when we ever see a coaching client or a student maybe floundering or struggling, somewhere at the base it comes back to one of these things.

And either not taking action or not taking the right kinds of action that are congruous with the kind of freedom you want, the kind of relationships you want, the purpose you want, the goals that you’ve set for yourself.

Sterling: Absolutely, very much agree. Now we definitely want you to take some action so here’s some things we want you to ask yourself. So first, imagine yourself one year from the end of your life and ask yourself these three questions. What kind of freedom are you enjoying? What kind of relationships are you enjoying? And what purpose have you fulfilled? So those are things to think of, and then how you can make that happen is the purpose of those questions.

Jay: Yeah it’s like laying out a road map, we’re saying what’s the destination? So imagine yourself there, what does it look like? And this is called…some people call it future pacing or whatever, but you’re not going to hop in a car and say hey we’re going on a road trip somewhere cool and you don’t have a map, and then we can start moving it backwards and we talked about backwards planning before and it’s like okay, well what comes right before that kind of freedom and those kinds of relationships.

And that’s actually what we want to talk about next time is okay, where does this all begin? I don’t want to have any of those failures at the end of my life, I do want increased success and happiness, where does it start right now? And there is one very critical step again, another key ingredient to this whole “secret sauce” that people are always wondering where it is and what it’s about. And so that’s what we’re going to go into in the next episode.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip….

Jay: Alright, we’re going to jump right to the Quick Tip, no announcements today because we had a long episode there, a lot of stuff we really wanted to talk about, very important stuff.

So this is related to something we mentioned recently as a Quick Tip and that is the Strengths Finder book and it’s a book you can get on Amazon for about $13, you go take an assessment and it’s very, very insightful. I mean we just talked about purpose, if you want to know a great tool that you can go and discover more about your purpose today, Strengths Finder will be incredibly helpful in doing that.

But actually today’s Quick Tip, this episode’s Quick Tip is another book that’s related to the same research and the same strengths based way of thinking. And it’s written by a guy by the name of Marcus Buckingham, the book is called “Go Put Your Strengths to Work.” So if Strengths Finder is the way to find your strengths and get some insight into what they are, “Go Put Your Strengths To Work” is okay how do we now make sure that we start getting our life more and more in sync with expressing those strengths and doing those things that we’re good at and that fulfill us most?

And the cool thing is it’s a methodology, I believe he has like six steps and I’m actually…I haven’t quite finished but I’m just eating it up so much I wanted to definitely mention it in this episode since it relates to what we’ve mentioned recently. And it’s six steps he walks you through of making sure we’re getting some of the mindset stuff out of the way, and then okay how do we in practical terms figure out how to make our life so we’re spending more of our time on our strengths and less of it doing the things that drain us.

So anyway, check that out. It’s called “Go Put Your Strengths To Work” by Marcus Buckingham and if you haven’t already, check out Strengths Finder, the Clifton Strengths Finder 2.0, both are available on Amazon or your local book seller.

Sterling: Yeah you’re probably going to want to get Strengths Finder 2.0 first since the other one is about how to use it. Now if you’d like dozens of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, along with video tutorials showing you exactly how we use them. To get a 30-day no risk trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, visit freeaudiogift.com. That’s it for this episode of Internet Business Mastery, until next time we wish you ultimate success in your internet business.

You’ve been listening to the iconoclasts of the 9 to 5, and the purveyors of freedom and fulfillment – Sterling and Jay. Sterling and Jay invite you to discover one of their most popular audio programs ever – The 3 Pillars of Designing Your Ultimate Internet Lifestyle. Visit freeaudiogift.com now and sign up for the free weekly Internet Business Mastery email newsletter and you’ll get instant access to this life changing audio presentation pulled directly from the content of the acclaimed Internet Business Mastery Academy membership community. Go now to freeaudiogift.com. Internet Business Mastery – free your mind!